nothing can efface our recollection of its former exquisite representative, at least, its present one is without a rival.'

"There!' exclaimed Matilda, starting from the table, there! see an example of the basest perfidy. What an abominable creature! I now see. what was the purpose of her cunning advice! insidious wretch-I was in her way, and she was determined to remove me.' She burst into a flood of tears. Eugenia attempted to soothe her-all was in vain. She at length asked, whether she should order the carriage to be ready for the soirée. 'Yes,' said Matilda, order it; and instantly, too, for I must see this abominable woman's performance before I sleep, if I am ever to sleep again. I will never put faith in human protestations while I live.'

"The carriage was ordered; Matilda arrived at the theatre as the curtain rose. She saw her wily friend looking pretty enough to make any woman miserable. She heard the applauses reiterated; the clever actress played better and better, until Matilda could endure the sight no longer, and flew out of the house. She flung herself on Eugenia's neck, and owned that, with every means of happiness, she was the most unhappy being alive. Her habits had been broken up, the natural pursuit of her mind was taken from her, the current of her original delights was turned off, and fashionable life, opulence and enjoyment, could not refill the deserted course.' Let no actress,' said she, ever dream of happiness, but in adhering to the profession of her heart, her habits, and her genius!'

“Matilda withered like an autumnal flower: free but foggy, England threatened her with consumption. Travel was prescribed, and the Swiss and Italian atmosphere kept the flower on its stalk-and no more. Within six months, letters from home informed her that Sir Charles had died, like a patriotic Englishman, of a victory at a contested election, in the height of summer. She gave many a tear to the memory of this honest, loving, and by no means brilliant husband. She loved him; and, if she could have conceived it possible to make his figure succeed on the stage, she would have certainly not loved him less: but now the world was before her. Sophonisba was still playing her Julia,' drawing tears from half the world, and receiving proposals from the other half, which she was too cunning to accept. Matilda ordered a post-chaise and four, drove through Fondi, with a speed that knocked up her escort of chasseurs, and distanced Il Gran Diavolo, who was on the look-out for her equipage, with a full levy of his smartest dressed thieves; rushed through Lombardy, to the astonishment even of the English; and scarcely slept, ate, or existed, till she stopped at the St. James's Hotel.

"Her family affairs were despatched with the swiftness of a woman determined on any purpose under heaven. Her arrival was incog.; her existence had been, of course, utterly forgotten by her dear five hundred friends,' within the first week of her absence. She gave Eugenia a portion with a country curate, who had won her heart during a walk through the wonders of Oxford; and, next morning, sent for the rival manager, by her original name; her title was cast aside for ever. He waited on her, with an expedition most incredible to those who best know the movements of those weights of the theatrical machine; heard her offer with rapture; and announced the re-appearance of the public favourite, in red letters, of a length that was a wonder of the arts.

"Matilda appeared; she delighted the audience. Sophonisba disappeared; she found that she had nothing to do but to marry, and she took pity on the silliest heir to the bulkiest estate among the dukedoms. Matilda enjoyed the double triumph; glowed with new beauty, flashed with new brilliancy, was the fortune of the manager, the belle of the day, and was supposed to be one of the principal holders in the last three loans of the last war.

BOYLE FARM.

Boyle Farm. A Poem. London. Bull, 1827. 12mo.

THE most impudent, insignificant, little humbug, that has been thrust upon the public for some time is Boyle Farm, a poem, by a person of quality. At a distance from town we heard an immense clucking about this production, which was said to be of such alarming merit that the author himself did not dare publish it; such puffing, with shame we confess it, fanned our curiosity into a blaze; and we took up the volume, when we at last obtained it, with the expectation of something very extraordinary-and extraordinary it undoubtedly is in the strict sense of the word-extraordinarily stupid. Beginning with the beginning, as is our custom, we read this Advertisement, which contains in plain bookseller's prose, more invention and fancy than is to be found in the poem whose approach it heralds:

"The era in the fashionable world which is celebrated in the following poem, was one so striking and brilliant, and the poem itself is so graceful, spirited, and characteristic of the high society which it delineates, that the publisher has thought that he could not perform a more acceptable service to the beau monde than by presenting it with this literary brochure in a distinct form. Poems and novels, affecting to give pictures of fashionable life, have latterly abounded; but unhappily it has too frequently happened, either that the author's station in society was such that he could not possibly be acquainted with the scenes and characters which formed the subject of his work, or that if he were one of that privileged class to whom the mysteries of high life are revealed, he was not possesed of taste and genius sufficient to elevate him to a high rank among the literati of the country. The noble author of Boyle Farm, however, is highly gifted in both particulars, and the illustrious house of Trentham, which in the fourteenth century produced the father of English poetry, the moral Gower,' has in the nineteenth won for itself fresh laurels, which bid fair to be as enduring as those which grew up in the olden time.”

The fact is, that the " poem" does not delineate, or attempt to delineate, high society, or any society at all. It seems to have been written without any plan, or any coherent ideas, and the effect of it is pretty similar to that produced by the rehearsal of an old woman's dream. All sorts of things are jumbled together with a most unprovoked confusion, and the common laws of association are set at utter defiance. But before we proceed further we will extract from the introductory pages, a curiously ill-written paragraph on the subject of our notice, copied from a publication peculiarly dedicated to the honour of this kind of light litter, and thence called the Litter-airy Gazette (vulgarly corrupted into literary):

"The following statement is from the Literary Gazette, in which this interesting poem originally appeared:- B-E F-M, or Boyle Farm, was famous in the annals of last fashionable, season, for a fête given there by some five persons of the highest ton. The supreme pleasures to be enjoyed on such occasions can only be surmised by those who undergo the operation of attending them, can only be guessed at by the cruel envy and disappointment of those who happen not to be of the elect. Preferring, as we do, the quiet of the study, we can yet imagine that others may be highly gratified by the exhibition of their persons in gala dresses, and by the fatigues of a crowded rout or fête champêtre. At all events, the entertainment of Boyle Farm has inspired an elegant laureate to sing its praise; and as the poem (ascribed to Lord Francis Gower) has been kept very closely, we trust our readers in general will

not be displeased with us for printing it, as we are sure the porcelain classes will be most grateful to us for giving them what they have so anxiously sought to behold.

"How we came to be possessed of so secret and sacred a composition, we are bound, but at the same time embarrassed, to explain. Suffice it to say, without betraying confidence in an ungallant manner, that the rarity of the poem having caused it to be an object of much fashionable solicitude, the charming Lady ****** copied it entirely into her own fair characters, and with a kindness (to be duly and gratefully remembered) did us the favour to bestow it upon the Literary Gazette.""

That commencement," B-e F-m, or Boyle Farm," is to our minds perfectly delicious. How exquisite to assume the mystery of the name in one clause and obligingly to drop it in the next for the instruction of country cousins! Then how exact the information, and how felicitously expressed; that the supreme pleasures to be enjoyed on such occasions can only be surmised by those who undergo the operation of attending them (i. e. the occasions!). And how modest, and at the same time, necessary, the annunciation that, " We prefer the quiet of the study to brilliant fetes!" And last of all, how delicate the embarrassment, to explain by what means the poem, which had been kept very closely, came into the hands of the editor; and with what a genteel Morning Post like simper, half bashful, half boastful, the good man - tells of the charming lady ******'s favours.

In the poem itself which has provoked all this flummery, we perceive nothing remarkable, except the naval and military turn of the noble author's similes. He first likens beauty dressing for a fete to a ship lying-to, head to wind, in the Bay of Biscay, suddenly favoured with a fair wind aft, and spreading canvass to catch it :

"Oft have I seen in Biscay's main,

When head to wind some ship has lain,
Sore struggling with the tempest's forces,
With masts made snug and close-reef'd courses,
Sudden exulting sailors hail

The omens of a favouring gale,
Stay-sail and flying gib unroll'd,

Quit the dark caverns of the hold ;
To shake the reefs out every hand
Is busy, every yard is mann'd-
Till like a butterfly she sweeps,

With all her mighty wings, the deeps."

We had no idea before we read these lines, that butterflies had "mighty wings:" but perhaps Boyle Farm butterflies are bigger than ordinary. Nor did we think that the description of sweeping was applicable to the flight of butterflies, which always seemed to our eyes of a directly opposite, a flickering character.

Again, a lady looking out of window is like a ship with sails bent and yards squared, and a spring upon her cable to boot, to bring her broadside to bear:

"Now, each amusement antedating,

I see her at the window waiting,

Like ship for fight or speed prepared,

Her sails all bent, her yards all squared;

Which, mann'd with hands and hearts all able,
Lies with a spring upon her cable,

And waits the telegraph's command,
To gain her offing from the land."

A rocket is let off at Boyle Farm and it suggests this curious matter of fact London Gazette anecdote, having to do, not with Lords Chesterfield, Alvanley, and de Roos's fête, but Leipzic, Blucher, and Napoleon:

"And hark! a novel sound surprises;

In air the warning rocket rises.
'Twas thus, on Leipzic's awful night,
When warring Europe paused in fight,
The fiery sign mysterious rose,
Ill understood by all but those
Who knew by previous information;
It told them that another nation,
With forward Blucher in its ranks,
Was station'd on Napoleon's flanks."

On hearing the rocket, all the company flock to see the fireworks; and they are like the troops of a leader endeavouring to make good a position, and disturbed by a threatening demonstration. We cannot for the life of us see in what the resemblance particularly consists; but that is not our affair:

"How quick that warning sound has made
A desert of each lonely glade!

Each silent walk and half-lit alley
Are dull as Johnson's happy valley;
Forlorn of every living thing
The Indian cottage and the spring.
In one be-shawl'd, be-feather'd cluster,
Upon the river's banks they muster,
To view, not glimpses of the new light,
But rocket, Catherine-wheel, and blue-light.
Thus, when some leader, to make good
His station, fills a neighbouring wood
With those insidious troops in green,
Whose powers are sooner felt than seen;
If suddenly his own position

The foe should threaten with perdition,
The bugle sounds; o'er all the plain
The scatter'd masses close again;

Kicking their steeds with all their feet,
The skirmishing huzzars retreat,

Resume the sabre from the side,

And sling the carbine as they ride.

Then from the bristling square once more

The musquetry's collected roar,

In one tremendons chorus, stifles

The drooping fire of scatter'd rifles.
Triumphs of carbon and of nitre,

None ever saw or wished ye brighter."

Those persons, who, from the announcements and puffs, expect to find in Boyle Farm "scandalous personalities," and sketches of fashionable life, or portraits of fashionables, will be egregiously disappointed. There is but one dash headed and tailed with letters (A-y) which is commonly the great staple of such performances from the beginning to the end of the string of rhymes; and nothing more

personal than the quoted resemblance of a lady at her toilette to a ship spreading canvass in the Bay of Biscay. In a word, the whole performance is a nothingness. It can only be described by negations of good and bad. There is no fancy, no poetry, no idea, no plan, no wit, no imagination, no invention, no pleasantry, no personality, no persiflage, no scandal, no anecdote in it.

Perhaps it may be said, that we ought to speak more indulgently of it as the author did not intend its publication. With that, whether true or false, we have nothing whatever to do. It is in print, which gives us jurisdiction and we look only to the merits of the article on sale, in quality of literary clerks of the market. Whether the warcs are stolen or not, is not our affair; but we may just observe, by the way, that we are not believers in rapes of publication.

DIARY

FOR THE MONTH OF DECEMBER.

1st. In an application for a criminal information against the Reverend Thomas Brooksby and John Crabbe, Esq. two Essex magistrates, a speech was attributed to the former gentleman, which comprehends within itself a perfect "mirror of justice;" such as justice is in our rural districts, and administered by our rural authorities. The language ascribed to Mr. Brooksby may be received by the public as a key to the peculiar pranks of the unpaid; and any one newly placed in the commission of the peace, who shapes his course according to it, as by a chart, will, without effort or difficulty, act up to the conduct of the worshipful and much lauded corps of Solomons, to which he belongs. If the publication of a manual, called "The Complete Justice, or Committing Made Easy," were judged necessary, nothing more would be requisite than the few words of instruction we are about to quote. In the reply to the suggestion of taking counsel's opinion on a certain point, the Reverend Mr. Brooksby said:

"We want no law, nor the advice of counsel either; my mind is made up. My father used to say, that the magistrates should have nothing to do with law [a laugh]. The less they have to do with it the better, in my opinion. We do not sit here to administer the law, but to act as magistrates. Give me the papers, and I will cut the Gordon knot (meaning, of course, the Gordian knot)."

We would have these words written in letters of brass over the door of every justice's chamber, and every session room in the kingdom:-"We do not sit here to administer the law, but to act as magistrates."

The phrase "to act as magistrates," according to the best reading, signifies" to do as we please."

The Reverend Mr. Brooksby's objection to the mention of law before magistrates reminds one of Mrs. Malaprop's exception to that of honour before ladies. When Sir Lucius names honour, she exclaims, "Fie Sir Lucius, to mention honour before ladies. Let us have no honour before ladies, Sir Lucius."

On the same day on which the above brilliant dictum was quoted